Author: midlandfilmmonkey

On the 16^th January this year the world became a little greyer as David Lynch shuffled off of this plane, presumably into the antechamber of some much odder place with a penchant for red velvet curtains.

Like many people of my age, my first encounter with David Lynch was Twin Peaks flickering onto the small screen in the early nineties. It felt like another world, indeed it was another world and one far stranger than we could imagine. One that looked as cosy and familiar as an apple pie on the surface but was far weirder and stranger and ultimately more disturbing underneath. One where the apple had been allowed to wither and rot away below the surface.

The ironic thing is that when Lynch was interviewed he came over as the opposite. Mel Brook’s description of him as “Jimmy Stweart from Mars” is apt, reflecting his down to earth everyman persona of someone who was unfailingly polite and was never heard to swear, a genuine boy scout (of which he was immensely proud) whose charming demeanour disarmed you even as he was discussing whatever strangeness he was working on.

And that pretty much describes most of his output over the years, charming and kooky on the surface but troubling underneath.

But Lynch was far more than that. Lynch was above all an artist interested in exploring film as a medium of dreams, albeit ones that often resembled nightmares, of turning the traditional narrative on its head to create stories and loops within stories and loops, a puzzle knot to be deciphered. Even his most conventional seeming films reflect this, images recur throughout and across films almost establishing a shared world between his works of shared memories and often shared lives.

His films covered a variety of genres, surrealist horror, Victorian melodrama, sci-fi epic, comedy, but more often than not mysteries which allowed him to explore the dreamlike vistas he became known for. To me his three best works explore this most, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks. The first two explore his recurring theme of “A woman in trouble”, blurring the lines between the victim and femme fatale in each case to create a level of discomfort Inn the audience. The latter was something else, starting as a mystery attached to a soap opera, but in the latter series released twenty-five years after the original it again morphed into something else. Episode Eight in particular may be one of the most experimental pieces of television ever released, a meditation on evil loosely formed around the narrative of the Trinity Test Site that allows for a deeper exploration of what Twin Peaks is about.

Lynch was also one of the great directors of women. Many of his films revolved around the premise of “A woman in trouble”, but in each case that only told half the story and, there was meat to those roles. Lynch trusted his women to carry his films rather than reducing them to the  supporting role. It’s difficult to stress how increasingly uncommon this is, especially within Hollywood. Lynch even poked fun at this, the audition scene from Mulholland Drive is a masterclass in taking apart the traditional female role within film, stripping it back and creating another narrative within the wider narrative, one that questions how Hollywood treats women.

His soundscapes were also integral, often discordant hellscapes mixed with pop bubblegum. Dean Stockwell miming to Roy Orbison is an image that is difficult to forget as is the clicks and hisses of hundred of beetles as they writhe in a severed ear.

So goodbye Mr. Lynch and thank you for invading our dreams over the last fifty years with your dark and troubling own.  

The term “Low Budget” gets thrown around a lot these days but Hundreds of Beavers really is low budget, probably a lot less than the average TV Episode of a not particularly effects driven or named actor led show these days and at no stage does it attempt to hide this fact, instead revelling in the absurdity of its lo-fi trappings, obvious bargain basement special effects and  people dressed in cheap costume-shop level depictions of the titular creature (and other creatures to boot).

Despite all of this it works. It is possible that it works so well because of these facts forcing the makers to focus their efforts into filmmaking in a way that can’t be solved with money. Certainly none of the cheapness did anything to dampen the reaction of the audience I saw it with. A bit like The Substance this is a film where the ending makes complete logical sense in context but sounds utterly ridiculous when you try to describe it.

“A cider maker goes on a drink fuelled frenzy to eliminate every beaver in the forest for destroying his barrels and to win the hand of the woman he loves.”

Along the way the narrative follows something more akin to a video game with grinding, side quests and random encounters replacing a traditional narrative structure and plot progression. Indeed narrative is possibly too strong word, this is instead a series of visual jokes strung together with the barest of plots to justify the sight gags but this isn’t a problem. There is the barest of plots enough to hang all of this on but only just. It really doesn’t need any more than that to function, indeed if you were to look at it too closely it probably wouldn’t work.

I loved every minute of it. It is at once an art-house delight in that no general fleapit is going to consider showing it as you couldn’t guarantee an audience but also utterly mainstream (sort of) in that it has absolutely no highbrow intention nor pretences to anything more meaningful If it’s funny it goes in the film. And if it’s really funny then the joke is repeated fifteen minutes later with a subtle or not so subtle twist to the previous joke. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. That is it for the entire running time in which if you don’t find the current joke funny it doesn’t matter as another will be along in the next twenty seconds. It’s the same model that Airplane! used to great effect but without the recourse to verbal gags as the film is silent, something I’m not sure is a perfectly understandable with the context stylistic choice or because recording dialogue costs money.

Okay, occasionally it feels a little bit repetitive and the middle does sort of sag a bit, I’d admit that this is a film that perhaps would benefit from a little cutting to take it further under the two hour mark than it is. And as it moves from the more repetitive early parts akin to the aforementioned level-grinding to the higher jeopardy ending the film flounders a little, but all of this is forgotten once we come the finale when the film takes another narrative leap into the unknown and pushes its absurdist boundaries. It is here that it becomes its most inventive as genres blend with an increased confidence almost as if the film was shot in chronological order and everyone feels more comfortable about what they can get away with. A mish-mash of kung-fu action / sci-fi horror / screwball comedy all meet in a way that shouldn’t work but still does despite of itself. The utter absurdity has become the reason at that stage, the driving force of everything.

This certainly has cult film written all over it. Whether it ever achieves more than that remains to be seen, I can see it becoming a staple of the late night circuit. What the makers do to follow this up is anybody’s guess. It is certainly difficult to figure out how something that is more commercially viable but retains the same sense of goofy energy that doesn’t feel forced could be made, and polish could rob it of some of the charm that is derived from how rough around the edges it occasionally is.

Is it worth watching?

I’d cautiously say yes. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea but that doesn’t matter. Occasionally we all need a complete one off.

Oh boy, where do we start?

The first thing to say is that this film is going to divide audiences, you’ll either love it or loathe it but I can’t see anyone sitting in the middle ground for this as it almost expects that you have a strong view on it.

Secondly this is a film that will present a different viewing experience in the cinema where the sheer size of the screen made it feel like an almost hallucinatory experience than on the small screen where it will feel more like some sort of missing video nasty from the eighties. I strongly suspect that both will reveal different aspects of the film and I can’t wait to see it on the smaller screen.

Lastly the BBFC were completely on point with their almost essay length description of content, you really do need to know what you’re letting yourself in for before sitting down. I think the last film I saw where this was the case was Antichrist and again that was a similar viewing experience, albeit one that wasn’t quite as disturbing.

So how do you describe it without giving away anything? Friends have asked and I’ve said “Imagine that David Cronenberg directed Mulholland Drive”, but that’s not really accurate. “Imagine that David Cronenberg directed Mulholland Drive but became obsessed with Society halfway through filming” may be more accurate. There’s an element of Hollywood fable to it that it shares with Mulholland Drive, but there’s also a strong dose of body-horror played straight for yuks and it lacks the subtlety of both Cronenberg and Lynch which is something I thought I’d never really say. It’s also more overtly political in its message than either of those directors works and doesn’t shy away from holding a mirror up to society that I can’t recall either of them coming close to doing. It is this societal comment that gives the film its real teeth. And this film has teeth in more ways than one.

Body-horror only just starts to cover the sights on offer here. There are scenes that will elicit “Bloody hell!” on more than one occasion and there’s a pleasing physicality to all of the effects with the sense that digital has only been used to clean up the edges. Indeed one of the most horrifying scenes requires no effects work whatsoever but instead consists of an extreme close up of someone eating shrimp. It’s worse than it sounds and an example of where the visuals are enhanced by what can only be described as one of the most visceral sounding soundscapes of recent memory with every broken bone, lost tooth or piece of French cuisine suitably ramped up. Aside from the more obviously monstrous elements of the film the body-horror is also on a deeply believable level as teeth, fingernails and cracking joints all timetable the shared breakdown of the same character.

It’s not subtle – subtle is on the corner rocking back and forth – but neither is it crass, instead pitched perfectly from start to finish so that the opening image is bookended with the same image but played less for laughs. Everything has the volume turned up but it’s hard to see how else this could work.

Which brings us to the key driver of the film, a set of performances that are glorious to behold. I’ll start with Dennis Quaid who has the least screen time but is utterly repellent every moment he’s on screen as a sort of garish caricature of a human being  and in particular the male gaze, all false smiles and charm and no redeeming features. Everything he does is driven by a desire for more power, more money and more status and he’ll stop at nothing to get there. However this is a film dominated by the Moore / Qualley duo of both sides of a characters shared self-hatred for what they are, what they were and what they could be. I’d not seen Qualley in anything before but there’s a full on commitment to what could be an unsympathetic role as she is ultimately the means of her own self destruction.

However the film belongs to Moore and her willingness to explore her own image and the past image that was created of her in extreme, often painful detail. The highlight of the film for me is a scene where she continually reassesses her own image in front of a mirror with the weight of the expectations of the industry she has been part of resting fully on her. Skin is rubbed raw in an attempt to achieve the ludicrous standards that she now demands of herself in a manner that is far more painful to watch than any of the multiple bodily transformation sequences that the film provides. I’m always pleased when actors not normally associated with the horror genre turn up and show a real flair for it and Moore doesn’t disappoint by committing fully from start to (inevitable) finish. It’s also refreshing to realise that whilst she may have been in some bad films in the past she was never bad herself, just the victim of some poor career choices and mediocre films. Certainly I’d hope to see her continue to push the boundaries like this, make interesting choices and enjoy the plaudits she richly deserves for this.

In summary if you’ve got the stomach for it then The Substance is an absolute blast from start to finish, smart and funny and with a clutch of performances that are superb and add a real heft to the film. It isn’t for everybody but you’ll know beforehand if this is something that you’re going to appreciate. I’m not sure I saw a better film in 2024. I certainly didn’t see one I was so eager to talk about.